and in the words that he spoke at the white house, the first words were of himself as immigrants, and our country being proud of immigration country, so he has moved the n conversation there, and he has spoken over and over again, and the need to protect the planet, and explicitly talked about the climate change, and these are the two areas where he is kind of pushing the church, and particularly on the climate chan change. i think that this could have a lasting impact on our debate. and some of the more conservative catholics who share his sense of compassion, and may have some further thoughts on these issues after the pope leaves. what do you see as the common thread between the president obama, because when we look at the politics, if pope francis was a politicians do you believe he would be a democrat, right? well, i don t, and you know, i think that the last thing that we should do is to try to say that, because he is pro life, and he is talking about that a couple of times,
part of their life is the idea conventionalism doesn t apply to him. when he says he s taking on the god created the heavens and the media, he s taking on the media. earth. there are large elements of it got him in the headlines religious communities that feel very differently and what pope again. it was actually a great move. is doing is saying we re he s got his core group. custodians on this earth. we re here temporarily. it s a different way of casting the whole climate issue and i m going to emphasize this a lot today. he also gave conservative catholics something to cheer about. actually three things that i one could argue that it s counted. actually a brilliant move for fir . first of all, he was talking about religious liberty. him to say all the sudden you obviously, to the president s affordable care act and forcing wake up and he s going after fox catholic toss do things they news. it s interesting and dicey. didn t want to and also talked about the importance of family
history. and i mean, this is the first of the unkom focomfortable, and out of the the gate, the first uncomfortable topic, and it is just minutes into the address. there is more to come. i think that the bishops won t have a whole lot of time to process that before he is going to move on to the abortion and climate change and political topics. of course, they will be fine with abortion, and some of them wish he was speaking about abortion more, because he said that we don t have to speak about the hot debate issues, and he is going to mention abortion, and many had hoped that he would, and a lot of them will be pleased with that, and a lot of the conservative catholics will be pleased about that, because they have felt that he has not focused on abortion, and same-sex marriages which are the right topics. we have been hearing about the religious e freedom both from the pope and the president this morning, and how the country prides itself on the religious freedom, and we are in t
country fundamental identifiers for conservative catholics. and so in the first instance they felt, you know, this was kind of a strange thing for a pope to be saying and then he came out with an encyclical on the environment and a lot on immigration. and so certainly there, i think, is still, at least there was, a question, some conservatives mind, which way does the pope want to go? and that s what s interesting about what he said on the papal plane, that i m not a lefty, because he s responding to that. and so he s saying what i believe is exactly in keeping with scripture, with the gospel. absolutely. and it s really a question, i think for the likes of us, emphasis might be a little different but he s not going to change his position on abortion or same-sex marriage or birth control. no, no. i think that should be clear for both sided. but but he is bringing in a lot of the the other issues which we think of as left. right.
they re nervous is he not going to de-emphasize social issues including same-sex marriage or abortion. i think what will happen and people who know this pope better than i do is he s going to make everyone uncomfortable and part part of the job to make the politicians uncomfortable a little bit with their own views and he is going to challenge them. so far, we have one member of congress, republican of arizona sitting out because he disagrees with what the pope said on climate change? that is right. i have been stunned. look. george will, okay, sort of i mean, the conservative columnist, not somebody he really basically decided to treat pope francis as an elected official and went after when anymore that way. and you re hearing some commentary. i think for the most part, though, conservative catholics and not happy about what climate change for the most part seen them rick santorum or others go out of their way to not